Loome: Tim Tebow legislation detested by parents
By Nancy Loome
If you want to get Mississippi moms and dads riled up, just ask them about the “Tim Tebow” bill. The legislation, pushed by the school choice lobby, would allow homeschool students to participate in public school activities (sports, band, choir, etc.).
Homeschool parents pay school taxes, too, you might say, so why the opposition?
Here’s what gets public school parents so rankled…
Over the past couple of decades, the Mississippi Legislature has imposed countless mandates on how and what public school students learn, increased academic standards and graduation requirements, micro-managed attendance policies, and prescribed penalties for public schools and students if they fall short.
Among those mandates is a law passed in 2009 requiring public school students to maintain a 2.0 grade point average to participate in high school activities. If you don’t make the grade, you can’t play.
Homeschooled students get a pass on those requirements. No attendance policy. No requirement for academic rigor. No mandatory courses. The sum total of requirements for homeschooling a Mississippi student:
- Withdraw the student from school
- Complete a 9-line homeschool enrollment form
The enrollment form provides one line on which the parent is to describe the educational program for home instruction. That’s it. No reporting. No check-in to see if the program is actually implemented or what the student learned.
With virtually no regulation of homeschooling in Mississippi, educators report numerous incidents of parents withdrawing children from school and completing that nine-line form in response to repeated calls from attendance officers or persistent disciplinary issues.
If passed, the Tim Tebow legislation would provide an easy circumvention of compulsory attendance laws for a public school athlete struggling to meet the 2.0 GPA requirement. Just have mom withdraw you from public school, fill out a few lines on a form, and you’re back in play.
The bill ignores the gigantic gulf between what is required of homeschooled students and what is required of public school students – and insists that homeschoolers not only be allowed to participate in public school activities, but that they be given preferential consideration where athletics are concerned. The legislation declares that they shall not be discriminated against because of their homeschool status when public school team rosters are decided, a legal standing not afforded public school students.
The legislation takes a stab at fairness by requiring that homeschoolers present a portfolio of academic work (graded by their parents) in place of the 2.0 GPA requirement levied on public school students. One version of the legislation required that homeschoolers take a state test in order to participate. It did not require that they pass it.
We’ve heard stories of parents who disenroll their children from school to focus their time and energy on their sport of choice, hoping to produce a pro athlete. Tim Tebow seems tailor-made for these families.
Their kids can sleep in – ensuring sufficient rest to perform well on the court or field, spend hours in private lessons, then show up at the public school mid-afternoon to compete with public school students (who spent their day in class) for a spot on the public school team.
It’s this hypocrisy – the obvious double standard – that so infuriates the parents of the 430,000+ students enrolled in Mississippi’s public schools, playing by the rules the Legislature passed.
If you’re counting, that’s close to 90% of Mississippi children. Their parents make up a pretty big voting bloc, and many of them made calls to their legislators earlier this year to voice their intense opposition.
Which is exactly why the Tim Tebow bill failed to pass in the 2025 Legislative Session.
Gov. Reeves said recently he’s considering adding Tim Tebow to a special session agenda. Public school parents might want to remind legislators why they killed that bill a couple of months back.
Nancy Loome is executive director of The Parents’ Campaign (msparentscampaign.org) and president of The Parents’ Campaign Research & Education Fund (tpcref.org). She and her husband Jim have three grown children, all of whom graduated from Clinton Public Schools. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
